Build Your Idea Muscle

Most folks have entrepreneurship all wrong.

The conventional mental image of the thrill-seeking, risk-junkie are a far cry from reality. The best entrepreneurs are actually risk-killers.

I’ve had the privilege of teaching hundreds of aspiring entrepreneurs at Stanford, who are always eager to know how they can bend the odds of success. My answer is simple.

The distinguishing feature of every successful founder is a capacity to craft and deploy scrappy experiments. The very best way to beat the odds facing any novel idea or venture is to become fluent in the mindset and tools of experimentation. Very few entrepreneurs have access to vast datasets; luckily, experiments to create proprietary data.

But here’s the catch: to design a good experiment, you need ideas. Ideas are the lifeblood of experiments. Therefore, a robust experimentation practice demands a rigorous ideation ritual.

I instruct aspiring entrepreneurs to build their ideation muscles through a daily “idea quota” — where each day, they consider any problem facing their business (could be sales, could be product, could be marketing, could be an operational issue, etc), and instead of trying to think of “the” answer, they flip the objective (from quality, to quantity), and force themselves to generate at least ten.

Requesting alternatives has long been a tactic of design professors at Stanford. We’ve just codified the approach and expanded its relevance to any idea problem our founders face.

And every problem is an idea problem.

Related: Consider the Odds
Related: Request Options
Related: The Dynamic Duo: Ideas and Experiments
Related: Do An Idea Quota

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